The every-so lovely NewspaperClub have just announced their prices for printing your very own paper. And this shouldn’t have to be said, but I will …
Printing your own Newspaper is very exciting.
People are already used to printing books and to an extent magazines, (Blurb, lulu and MagCloud as examples) but newspaper up to this point have been far trickier. Unless you wanted a run of a thousand or so; Newspaper presses are huge and fast (and print lots), digital ones still expensive and not that common.
And that’s what makes it a thrill when your newspapers arrive on the doorstep, like this …
Stuff I learnt
I was very lucky to be able to have a go at printing a Newspaper (again), so I took the opportunity to use various photos to try different things out. High contrast, stripes, gradients, solid blacks an so on, here’s an example double spread …
- Blacks will have that Newspaper look to them, not solid black, there’ll be specks of white and grey in there, but not as bad as you may think if you were tempted to ask the question “How’s the black appear?” I didn’t notice any weak stripes though the printing, or other stuff you maybe worried about.
- I used a couple of photos with subtle gradients in and didn’t expect them to come out as well as they did, basically if you have mid grays don’t worry about it too much, the print handles it well.
- When you convert colour images to black and white punch the contrast up a bit.
- Best advice came from Tom at NewspaperClub, blow the highlights out a bit (in a way you wouldn’t normally do). Because the paper isn’t white, your whites won’t be, well white. Everything from a very light grey to white will essentially look the same. So adjust your levels so there’s more white at the top-end i.e. drag your right hand marker down about 5-8%, if that makes sense (if it doesn’t don’t worry about it)
The only other thing I discovered was with the center spread …
When I designed the pages, each page had a margin around the edge. My settings …
Page size; 11.378 by 14.9606 inches, no bleed.
Margins; Top: 0.8661, Bottom: 0.9449, Inside: 0.5118, Outside: 0.6299, Gutter: 0.1667 (inches).
… which aren’t definitive or “The Correct” ones, just what I happened to used.
But because of the margins and the preview when I’d uploaded the PDF I assumed the center spread would have a margin down the middle. For that reason I cut out a strip of the center image, so they curves would appear correct, rather like looking out a window with two panes of glass in.
However, in this case the two sides were put flush together, and I didn’t need to cut a strip out of the middle … if you look closely at the picture you can see where the structure doesn’t match up under the dome, that’s totally down to me and not a printing error.
In short
If you’re printing photos, boost the contrast, tweak your levels a bit to give your top end more white, but don’t sweat it too much.
Have fun.
